Empathy Map for Millennials Like ME!

It's HW time and  I'm here to share an empathy map of potential market segments to be explored by our client company for Design Thinking class.  I think it's fantastic to take a look at a very familiar segment and see what they (or WE) feel from a third person perspective.

Planning for Pinoy Titos & Titas in America

Pinoy Perspective returns with even more Pinoy perspective!

Last weekend, I flew to SoCal to attend a cousin's wedding.  There, I reunited with several cousins, aunts, and uncles.  I learned there that a group of close to ten aunts and uncles (herein referred to as Titos & Titas) flew from the Philippines, and went on a trip around the US and Canada before the wedding.  I spoke with my cousin, Tenten, who planned and made arrangements for our Titos and Titas.

Moving in, Starting anew, Staying Connected

July 31st, 2017: I moved to America.

As a foreign student moving into the US for business school, one of the landmark experiences would be moving in. It's simple and everybody does it, but it still is a legitimate milestone.  It meant me leaving family behind and starting a new journey.  So let me talk about that whole experience.

My move to the US was quite unconventional.  I left work barely two weeks before flying to the US so I had very little time to prepare.  While most of my classmates booked their apartments weeks or even months before school started, I landed in Austin with a list of four apartment options I found online.  I was going to see them for myself, decide, and close the deal on my first few days.  I did find my apartment on my first day in Austin.  It's called the Penthouse.  It's not the nicest property, but the specific unit I eyed had just been renovated and was sparkling new.  And it is so close to campus.  Perfect.  While waiting for management to finish renovation, I stayed at an AirBnb for two weeks.

Two weeks later, the day came.  I was going to finally move into what would be my home for the next two years in Austin.  I had previously arranged with my brother for him to fly in from Nashville.  He was so enthusiastic to help me move in.  We met at the property management office, where I saw him come in a very-typically-large Texan truck.  

My Kuya (older brother in Tagalog) drove us all around Austin to get my move-in essentials.  We went to Home Depot.  We spent a considerable time at Bed Bath & Beyond (where he sold me the idea of paying for the softest sheets and towels).  I also had my first-ever trip to Costco (buying endless supplies of toilet paper and toothpaste, which seemed like they'd last me beyond my MBA).  We both knew that the Pinoy in me will not survive life in the US without my ever-so-reliable TV.  So we went to Best Buy, where I also grabbed a Google Home Mini (we didn’t have this back home so it felt like I was a five year old with a new toy for sure).  And then there was the epic shopping trip to move-in central: IKEA.  

At Ikea, I got all sorts of things that I needed (but my Kuya would argue the others were not really needs).  Among other things, I got a desk-or-dining-table, closet organizers, and of course, a legitimate Ikea couch.  Again, Pinoy perspective – we Pinoys know we’ll have guests.  So I definitely chose a nice pull-out.  There were so many other things we got in Ikea that I cannot remember.  Imagine this - all that shopping stuffed into our big red truck.  I could not imagine doing all that by myself.  It was so convenient.  And it was actually fun!

It was a long shopping day and my Kuya and I decided to celebrate that and my move altogether.  He found a restaurant on East 6^th that served a fusion of Japanese and Filipino food.  And it was the best (especially because Kuya paid for everything)!

On the day he was going to fly back to Nashville, we set everything up.  Ikea being Ikea, we had to assemble tables, the couch, and the bed.  Cheesy as it sounds, it’s kind of like how we would build stuff when we were younger.

Even after Kuya left, he kept sending my stuff through Amazon – from toothbrush holders to the ultimate Asian cup noodles.  It did not stop there.  There were days when I would get home from school seeing huge Amazon boxes outside my door.  Opening one box, I got the happiest shock to see Ninja Coffeemaker.  It would be the Firebolt of Harry Potter brooms, except this is a coffee maker.  It’s the best.  And my sister from the Philippines sent it over as a move-in gift.  The box also came with months’ supply of laundry detergent and fabric conditioner!  

Of course I posted that on Instagram.  A week later, I saw another package.  Upon opening, it was two large jars of New York coffee from my cousins in NY who saw my post the previous week.  The presents did not stop coming.  I got packages that had Kleen Kanteen tumblers from friends back home, and many others.  So much thoughtfulness.

I recall the events of that experience. It got me accomplishing several administrative things, such as booking my apartment, setting up utilities, and more.  It also saw my Kuya flying in to help me get settled in.  I even got move in presents!

Today, looking back, I now see it from a different perspective.  It was not just a series of events that helped me settle in.  While I was so relieved that my brother helped make that move very convenient, it also goes beyond that.  I did get very excited to make my own cappuccino with my sister's Ninja, but it was also more than that.  It was beyond all that.

As I write this, I’m actually getting goosebumps at how emotional I am getting recalling that experience.  It’s not just the events.  It's not even the emotions I remember having then.  I write this and realize that my move-in experience gave and continue to give me feelings much bigger than I had imagined.  

I am happy I got to spend time with family.  I'm happy to realize that despite moving thousands of miles away from most of my family, we continue to be connected.  

Today, I look back and realize that experience transcends events - it elicits emotions.  But most importantly, it has the tremendous ability to make us realize the bigger things that we truly feel.  Sometimes, we just have to look back and see how massive they really are.

Building Empathy at the Beach!

The PINOY PERSPECTIVE is back with three times more Pinoy perspective!  For this week's Design Thinking class, we were assigned to conduct a Generative Research Activity.  As I was in Miami doing a reunion of sorts (15 years overdue!) with my cousins and brother, I asked my two cousins (one is based in the Philippines and the other lives in London) to do the activity while at the beach (how fun!).

***

Jules and Bea, both of whom are millennial cousins of mine, handed over two very interesting outputs.  It was interesting to see how some of their answers were consistent with one another and how many others were very different.  Jules, who is a doctor in the Philippines and is in her early 30s, answered using icons and drawings.  Bea, a marketing professional in London who is in her late 20s, did the same, but with so much less words to elaborate.  For the first item, they handed a range of varying life priorities.  Bea pointed out some interesting cannot-live-withouts: foreign language, cognitive activity, and even yoga.  Jules, on the other hand, talked about sleep, and other very tangible items like her iphone, contact lenses, and a sunblock.  For the second questionnaire, I must admit that I was not surprised to see a very diverse set of media and information sources.  While they both said that they they use a lot of web search, they had different alternative sources.  What's interesting also is how both of them did not say TV is a main provider of information; which is quite validating for the generation that they both belong to.  The third and final item was very interesting.  Bea's answer, this time, showed more time spent on health and sports.  Her lines also suggested that she has more to-do things in mind when she goes about her day.  Jules, on the other hand, who mentioned health on the first item, had two main buckets where her time is most spent in - work and traffic (YES, that struggle is sadly very real in the Philippines).  Reading their responses, I learned that there seems to some non-negotiables can be similar in people - possibly because they are basic human non-negotiables.  At the same time, it was interesting to see how my two cousins gave varied answers that I did not see coming.

Conducting this research gave me some unexpected realizations.  First, it was simply fascinating to see the little surprises.  It would be easy to have expectations on their responses because 1) their demographic profile; 2) I know them.  But there were a number of answers that I did not see coming.  I knew Bea was into fitness, but I thought she'd say fitness is something she cared about; she ended up saying it's something she cannot live without (now the 2x a day yoga when she visited me in Austin last week makes sense).  Jules also surprised me that she cannot live without sunblock.  We went to beaches together and got 35x shades darker and when I talked to her after, I did not know she cared so much about preventing wrinkles!  Conducting this survey on my cousins, I found myself telling myself "yes, that totally makes sense" and "ha, I did not expect that."  All that led to a second and deeper main realization I got from this exercise.  People always surprise us.  We have our perceptions of them and we think we know exactly how they will respond to prompts like this activity. For instance, I was totally surprised to see Jules put contact lenses as a non-negotiable.  As someone who does NOT wear contacts, I now realize how this can indeed be something people cannot live without.  I totally missed that.  For Bea, I was pleasantly surprised to see a brain-and-light-bulb icon in her cannot-live-without circle.  When I asked her about it, she said she just cannot live without substantial and challenging cognitive work.  Considering that I am an MBA struggling working with things like regression models, I was impressed at how important this was to her.   In the end, I might have gotten some answers that I expected,but inevitably, there were a lot of things that I did not know. And this is true to the many people around us.  This activity really helped me appreciate the fact that we can never limit people to our perceptions of them.  It will never hurt to put more effort to get to know people more.  Working toward empathizing with them will uncover some insightful truths about even the closest people to us.

***

BEA

JULES

LESTER: The Millennial in Pursuit

Inspired by Everyday Magic

I once set a personal goal of travelling to the same number of countries as my own years of existence.  It is a ongoing goal, and today, I have visited thirty-two. 

Seeing other countries provides a priceless view of precious sights.  Seeing the expansive Forbidden City in Beijing made me imagine the thousands of people at court for whom the complex was built.  Climbing the steep portion of the Great Wall made me question why the people then designed it to be the worst OrangeTheory Everest workout ever.  I remember seeing the Disney Land castle for the first time and how happy I was that it looked exactly how a fairy tale castle should look like.  In Germany, I remember walking through the cobblestone streets of the prettiest old towns; I was in awe at the consistent look and feel of the German architecture.  And of course there’s Rome – where everything is both historic and just beautiful – even if they are only ruins of the majestic structures that they once were.  And then there’s Santorini in Greece where everything is in the shape of a dome and the only color of paint allowed on houses are either white or blue – and that provided gorgeous selfie backdrops for millennials like me.

 

Seeing the world has given me views of very impressive design.  As I reflect on design that has inspired me, I find myself coming closer to home.  As I wrote in my previous blog post, I have found that good design, at least to me, is 1) Intuitively useful; 2) Appropriately simple; 3) Aesthetically engaging.  Good design does not have to be located in the far east.  It need not be relics from early civilizations.  And it certainly does not have to be playing “It’s a Small World” when you see it.  

Inspiring design, as I have experienced, can also come in objects and experiences that we might think of as ordinary or mundane.

Reading about the work of Gianfranco Zaccai made me conscious about the wonder, or I would even daresay, the magic of ordinary things around us.  I previously wrote about the magic of the Toilet Wand and how that contraption has drastically improved my domestic life.  It is the design philosophy of people like Zaccai that conjures such magic in designing everyday objects.  And that, to me, is very inspiring.

An article by Wallstreet Journal entitled “The Engineer of Everyday Objects” finds him literally laying in a hospital bed, trying to discover the next big object design that hospital patients need.  He has pretended to be other things in order to feel the real consumer pulse.  I find this very fascinating as a marketer.

Prior to coming to business school, my marketing experience got me doing market and consumer research for brand strategies.  We gathered countless data and went through them back-and-forth to come up with decisive insights about our consumers.  This divergent thinking continued even as we zeroed in on what the data tells us.  As we come into convergent thinking, we look at the numbers and observations and continue to interpret what these insights really tell.  It really is a continuous divergent-convergent thinking process that involves looking at data.  Business school elevates further the need for data and interpreting what they say (ask any first year MBA taking the core).  And that is exactly why Zaccai’s approach is moving.  In a marketing world that is proliferated with data, and where marketers fall into the temptation of developing products from a distance, Zaccai provides a philosophy that gives personal touch to the design process.  And don’t get me wrong – it is not at all inaccurate.  In fact, it may be more accurate than any because it empathizes with consumers on a totally different level.

To illustrate my point about how this philosophy allows for inspiring marketing and product development, I’ll be talking about four different everyday products.

I wrote about the magical Toilet Wand, but a close runner-up to that was the Swiffer WetJet.  The WSJ article also mentioned that this other simple, effective, and highly insightful tool was born out of living the process by which people washed their floors.  Designs like these are inspiring in the daily sense.  While it does not elicit childhood dreams like the Disney Castle, it makes everyday cleaning easier.   If it weren’t for that, we’d still be cleaning our mops in a pail.  And that’s an everyday design is simply inspiring.

In Design Thinking class last week, we talked about the Pillpack.  I’m pretty sure that no regression model directly suggested that idea.  It is with a deep understanding of the consumer that we marketers really get to empathize with them and discover what they need.  The Pillpack, for instance, is something that inspires me greatly.  With parents who are now in their 70s, the inconvenience of having to sift through pill cartridges and boxes is very real.  I am so comforted by this everyday solution, knowing that my parents can take their meds with so much less worry.  I’m very happy that the philosophy similar to that of Zaccai exists to pave the way for this kind of wonder product.

During a training session in Unilever, I also remember a presentation about our toothpaste packaging.  Whereas in the past, the tubes were covered by a screw cap, it was discovered that a very annoying but strangely unarticulated pain point was that this cap always feel to the floor.  Always.  And that’s why the flip cap was introduced.  Simple wonder – derived from empathy with the customer. 

Finally, in my previous job, I managed a laundry brand.  Unlike 95% of the other laundry brands in the market, our product was a detergent soap that was made from natural ingredients.  Made from coconut oil (while all others are petroleum-based surfactants), the product I was handling was actually hypoallergenic.  It was a good product and our focus groups said that.  But it was hard to articulate to our agencies how exactly that made the product better.  And that was when I started doing laundry using fifteen different soap brands.  In the Philippines, laundry is usually washed by hand, so I washed clothes using different laundry detergent bars. That’s when I found out that after using most synthetic detergents made my hands itch, sting, and strangely hot.  In contrast, our product felt like you just washed your face with soap.  And right then, I understood what consumers preferred about our product – and how exactly that felt like.

Gianfranco Zaccai is truly a modern inspiration for design.  He has not designed massive landmarks in the far east.  He certainly did not come up with thousand-year-old structures that have withstood time.  And he definitely does not put up a fairy tale castle.  However, he is in inspiration to young marketers like me.  It is his philosophy of personal experience that takes empathy with the consumer to an entirely different level.  It is this kind of philosophy that paves the way for everyday products that create daily magic for us consumers.

First Post: Magic Wand!

On July 31^st 2017, I made one of the boldest moves I had ever made in my life – I moved to the US to take my MBA.  That, of course, involved going through a massive slew of school and career-related decisions and experiences.  What many people do not see, though, is the significant transition to living alone in a foreign country.  Just like that, I became a lone Pinoy (slang for Filipino) living in Texas.

Let me set the context of how it is for a Pinoy like myself to live in the US.  There are two main cultural norms that need to be understood about Filipinos.  First, Filipino children live with their parents far longer than most cultures.  Second, it is normal in our country to have household help. 

This is technically not my first time living by myself.  When I turned twenty-eight, I moved out of my parents’ house in the suburbs of Manila to live in in the city (avoiding monstrous Manila traffic jams).  In my new place, I added furnishing, did all the paperwork, applied and paid for all utilities – in other words, I did what my friends called the “adulting” stuff. I did all that but one – I did not do my own laundry.  My parents then claimed, and rightfully so, that I only partially moved. 

One of the benefits Filipino culture – and living with your parents and having help – is laundry.  You see, laundry in the Philippines is not as easy here in the US.  Most clothes are washed by hand.  In fact, only 33% of Philippine households own washing machines.  This was one of the staple household help tasks.  So I went home every week to my parents with a huge bag of dirty clothes, and swapped that with last week’s washed ones. 

Fast-forward to July 2017.  I moved into my apartment here in Texas.  This Pinoy, for the first time, finally legitimately lived alone with no Filipino parents and help.  This time, I did all the house chores myself – from doing the laundry, vacuuming the rug, changing sheets, making dinner, and cleaning the toilet.  This made me more conscious about all these chores and the products we use to accomplish them.

My brother, who has lived in Nashville for fifteen years, came to Austin.  He drove me to Ikea, Target, and Costco so I could get my initial supplies.  If you think about convergent and divergent thinking, I did thoroughly think about every single thing I needed.  Thinking about my daily activities, I realized that I would need not only a hamper but also a hanger for clothes that you would not throw into the hamper.  I thought about laundry and knew I needed a basket for that.  Diverging and convering again, I imagined what my process would be like in doing my laundry and realized that I needed a wheeled basket to transport my clothes to the laundry room which was in the building next door.

And then I thought about the inevitable task of cleaning the toilet.  I had already imagined getting the typical toilet brush cleaner which was what everybody used back home.  And then at Target, I was introduced to a magical product – the Toilet Wand.

Yes, I know this sounds trivial.  But from the perspective a Pinoy who had just moved to the US and practically lived alone for the first time, these are some of the most important product decisions to be made.

Back home, I was used to cleaning the toilet with the toilet brush that we are all familiar with.  You know – that stick, usually made of plastic, which had a handle on one end, and a round brushy head that I can only describe as one that looks like Marge Simpson’s hair.  We all know what I’m talking about.  That product did the job.  It cleaned the toilet bowls.  It reached some of the corners and crevices that you dare would not touch.  Together with some cleaning agents, these brushes did wipe your toilet bowl clean.  They did the job.  Or did they?

Did you ever use one of these brushes and brushed your toilet bowl a little too aggressively that the toilet bowl water splashed on you?  That’s not pretty, is it. Did your brush ever catch anything in that bowl, like toilet paper, and you had no brilliant idea how to take it out?  Did you ever figure out how to properly clean that brush (I have some ideas, but I’d rather not)?  Finally, was the brush ever enough by itself?

Yes, those good old toilet bowl brushes did the job.  But they also caused pain (more like disgust) points.  That is exactly why the toilet wand is indeed a magical product. 

Just like the brush, the toilet wand cleans.  Because of the stick-like structure, both products are able to reach far into the bowl.  Like the brush, the wand is able to scrape the surface of the ceramic as well.  The main difference is that instead of Marge Simpson’s head, the wand has a clamp on the other end, which can be controlled with a switch on the opposite end.  The clamp holds a sponge that has two main differences versus the brush: 1) It already has a cleaning solution; 2) the sponge is smaller than an average brush; 3) It is disposable.

The toilet wand, with the two main differences above, is able to provide consumers like myself with some important utility advantages.  First, I no longer need a separate cleaning solution; it is in the sponge.  Second, because the sponge is smaller, it causes significantly less splashing from the toilet bowl water.  Finally, it eliminates the unpleasant need to clean sponge (or brush).  You can simply unclamp it and flush it in the toilet. 

The toilet wand cleans efficiently (no need for a cleaning solution), it is less messy, and less traumatic (talking about having to go through the ordeal of cleaning a brush).  It’s magic (just imagine my reaction after discovering this product, which for some reason, companies like Clorox has not made available in the Philippines)!

What makes the Toilet Wand a magical product?  It is definitely a product of thoughtful and insightful design.  Looking at this seemingly simple innovation, I have come to illustrate what makes a good design.  I realize that great product design should be: 1) Intuitively useful; 2) Appropriately simple; 3) Aesthetically engaging.

The toilet wand is intuitively useful.  It uses the same basic structure of a proven product (toilet brush), but possess improvements for use.  The developers of this product definitely heard and empathized with some legitimate pain points.  We complained of water from the toilet bowl splashing, so they made the sponge smaller.  We were disgusted by the unhygienic ways to clean the brush after use so they made it disposable.  We also have a need for lower costs, so they dipped the sponge in concentrated cleansing solution.  The answers provided by the wand are very definitive and deliberate.

The toilet wand is also as simple as it is needed.  There’s no revolutionary contraption.  It is a stick with a handle, like the brush.  But possibly during prototyping stage, they found out that making the cleaning sponges disposable meant that they had to make it easy.  So they simply added a clamp at the end of the tool and added a switch on the other end.  Again, it empathized with a pain point and had a definite solution. 

Finally, the wand is also aesthetically engaging.  It is white and blue – a color combination that has been proven to be closely attributed with cleanliness.  Imagine if it were brown. 

Living by myself in a different country without the comfort of my Filipino family household had its challenges.  I did have to do things for the first time.  With a little bit of magic from the Toilet Wand and similar thoughtfully designed products, however, I am able to lessen my worries just a little tiny bit.